


Unto the Third and Fourth Generations

by voices_of_salt



Series: The Riera Cycle [6]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Duty, F/M, Family Issues, Forbidden Love, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Riera Soul-Twins, Sibling Incest, and poor Cecilia is left going "holy shit do you people not see how insane this is?", because Clan Riera has some fucked-up baggage, it's a pity honestly, objectively speaking Cecilia is the only sane person in that whole clan, so of course I went and made it worse, the idea of soul mates is already inherently horrific, this is a fun story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 12:42:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9896999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_of_salt/pseuds/voices_of_salt
Summary: Prompt: Someone my muse hurt in the past.In the early days of Mercedes and Arnau's relationship, their mother tried to save them from themselves.





	

Villa Riera lay sleepy and silent under a burnt golden sky. The midday sun blazed down, its heat creeping into every cool corner of the ancient house. The still air shimmered, and the few faint, gasping zephyrs that stirred the orange trees in the courtyard did so only to die in the branches. Even the buzz and churr of the insects seemed muffled.

Mercedes padded barefoot through the silent halls, humming a love song. Despite the heat she still wore a shirt - her brother’s. It was for him that she’d left the shady shelter of their room, headed to the cellar for a white wine. Her feet carried her on, but her thoughts had already flitted back to the room they shared.

He’d been asleep when she left. She sighed, remembering the sense of his sleeping contentment felt through their soul bond. The memory warmed her heart, but other memories set it beating faster: the image of Arnau lying in a loose-limbed sprawl across the sheets, his skin still damp and a hint of a smile lingering on his lips.

A swelling delight rose up in her chest. These days it always seemed to be there, just beneath the surface of conscious thought. She could _feel_ it - an infinite sea filling her chest.  She put her hand to her chest, half expecting to see golden light welling out between her fingers.

Three months had passed since she and Arnau became lovers. Three months since the lives they’d known burned to ashes and were born anew. Three months, and they still hungered for each other as if they’d never kissed in passion, never made love, never fucked, never ended gods knew how many years of denial, doubt, and deprivation.

They’d always been inseparable. They orbited each other like binary stars, always linked by an arm over a shoulder or hand on the back. But now they were mad for each others’ touch: they starved for it.

In the old stories _bruixes_ cursed sailors who stole food from their kin to eternal hunger. Lurid images of their suffering decorated the amphorae aboard every Lafanese ship. Their expressions seemed familiar now - she and Arnau devoured each other in the same mad frenzy. They tried to satiate the insatiable, mouths open, gasping to drink in each other’s breath, lips parted to taste skin. It was never enough.

They tasted a consummation so near to true dissolution, one into the other, that nothing could ever satisfy. Every time they made love they could _sense_ how close their two halves came to being whole. Again and again they chased the unattainable in anguished, ravening ecstasy.

Together, they were distracted beyond bearing. Apart, they drifted through a grey dream coloured only by fantasies of each other.

She’d never hoped to find such happiness. Even now she could hardly bring herself to believe she in fact possessed it. Her body seemed too small to contain it all: it rose up in the strangest moments, pouring out of her unbidden. It was all so new that every time she sought, wondering, for the source of her joy she was still surprised to find it there inside her.

The tide of it ran strong in her now, catching her up and carrying her away. Coming to the stairs, she leapt down them two at a time, still humming as she went.

“Mercedes?”

She froze on the last step. Turning, she saw her mother seated in the shade of the courtyard fountain. Accounting ledgers and receipts covered the little wrought iron table in front of her. Cecilia Domonova i Riera waved one ink-stained hand in greeting.

“Mama! I didn’t see you sitting there,” Mercedes said over-brightly.

Sweat beaded on Mercedes’ forehead and she wiped at it with her sleeve.

Cecilia, ever practical, sat cool and composed in an elegant, open-fronted linen robe whose primary function was to allow the otherwise naked wearer to sit on furniture without sticking.

By comparison Mercedes was conspicuously overdressed. That she wore one of Arnau’s shirts was no strange occurrence. But she'd wanted his scent around her, even for the brief trip between room and cellar. Now she was horribly conscious of the smell of sex heavy in the fabric.

“Why are you out here, Mama?”

“Hiding from your father,” Cecilia said. One corner of her mouth twitched up in the quick, crooked grin she’d bequeathed to her children. “I was hoping to get these done at my desk, but these hot afternoons get into his blood. I knew he’d convince me to put them off until tomorrow, so I removed myself from temptation.”

Mercedes attempted a chuckle, but her thoughts fled irresistibly to Arnau. There was heat, and temptation too. Barefoot and blinking in the midday sunlight, Mercedes hardly felt the bleached bone white afternoon or the cool tiles under her feet. None of it was real, not when her skin was electric with the ghosts of past caresses. Everything else faded to a meaningless blur – even her mother’s piercing gaze.

“Something on your mind?”

Mercedes snapped out of her reverie to find herself still standing in the courtyard. With an effort she focused on her mother.

Cecilia Domonova i Riera sat smiling at her youngest daughter. But there was an edge to the smile, something too taut in the pull of her lips.

"Come, _filla_ , sit with me."

"I was on my way downstairs.” Mercedes said, gesturing towards the cellars as if the destination argued some significance. “Arnau's expecting me to fetch us a bottle."

"I'm sure he can spare you for a moment. I'd like a word." Her mother indicated the chair opposite her. There was no denying her, not when she used that voice: it was the voice of the _Comptadora_ of Clan Riera, the woman who held the purse strings of the whole Riera fortune. And worse, it was the voice of her mother.

Mercedes sat.

Cecilia picked up the papers in front of her, tapping the edge of the stack square against the table.

"You two seem to have stopped fighting, these past few months."

It wasn't a question, so Mercedes didn't answer.

"I assume you came to an understanding when you were in Port Combreuc?"

Mercedes let a little of her true happiness bleed into her voice:  "We did."

"I’m so glad, darling. It broke my heart to see you two out of joint for so long when the gods made you to be in accord.” She reached across the table, taking Mercedes’ hand.

“Your father thinks you must have drunk an inn dry and fought until you knocked some sense into your own heads. He also expressed doubts as to whether said inn might still be standing.”

Mercedes squeezed her mother’s hand and slipped from her grasp before she felt how it trembled.

"Oh," she said affectedly, "it wasn't that spectacular. The inn’s still there, and I would wager there might even be some bottles left undrunk somewhere in the basement."

It was quite true. Even the bed of their gable room was still whole, although they'd paid extra for the damaged headboard, and double again for disturbing the other guests.

The memory still smoldered in her like coals so even the lightest brush of recollection set her alight: she felt again the coarse sheets, the stifling attic heat, and his sweat-slick skin against hers.

Most of all, she remembered when everything changed. In a molten moment she went beyond herself. She saw herself, felt herself through him, and he through her. Suddenly, they were _one_.

Raül and Caterina knew that unity. When plans unfolded between them, elaborate and intricate as filigree, balanced to withstand a hundred contingencies, they would nod at each other across tables strewn with maps and lists of ships. Reaching out, they clasped hands, and were silently, _one_ in thought and action.

Germà and Ramir had known it too. They’d lain close together with Laia nestled between, lost in quiet wonder that the gods had granted them so much love to share. It was the love the brothers were born with: a language of touch and reassurance which made them _one_. They took that love, offering it to Laia, and her love paired with theirs made them complete twice over.

To each pair their own ways of touching souls.

True to form, Mercedes and Arnau made a tempest of their passions, and their ecstasy was in the storm.

A complacent smile spread across Mercedes’ face. She and her brother had always been very skilled sailors.

Cecilia spoke: "You’ve gone sailing and left me on the shore again.”

Mercedes started.

“It’s a little rude, Mercéta.”

She opened her mouth, but Cecilia bore her down.

“Really, neither you nor your brother are not quite yourselves these days. Tell me, now: is there anything wrong?”

“No, no,” Mercedes said far too hastily. “Just tired.”

“And you’ve been so these past few months. I hope you didn’t catch something in Port Combreuc?”

“I – I think it’s just the summer heat. It has been a damn hot season.” The weather. She was talking about the weather. Oh ancestors.

Cecilia sat in silence - a weapon Mercedes had never yet learned to wield. Mercedes expended every iota of self-command at her disposal and managed not to fidget. Arnau tried to convince her they had nothing to be ashamed of, but she never believed him. Now she felt as though her thoughts were clear water and Cecilia’s sharp eyes saw straight to her depths.

“You are Arnau’s older sister,” Cecilia said at last. “He looks up to you, he always has. From the day he first saw you – even as a baby –  you’ve been his whole world.”

“Mama, I – ”

“If you even _thought_ about asking him to jump overboard, he would have thrown himself into the sea before you ever asked. There is nothing that boy wouldn’t do for you.”

“Mama –”

“Let me finish.” Her tone was perfectly conversational, but Mercedes cringed like a beaten dog.

“There is nothing he wouldn’t do for you,” her mother said again. “I understand very well that you two share the Riera soul-twin bond, but that makes it all the more imperative that you do what’s right for him.”

“I do!” Mercedes protested, goaded by loyalty to Arnau’s convictions rather than by any certainties of her own.

“He would do anything for you,” her mother repeated with terrible determination. “He follows your lead, and he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.”

Gods knew, Mercedes _had_ wondered if she’d led him into this. It had been her first thought when she’d realised he shared her feelings, in the apocalyptic instant she’d finally been able to put a name to the turmoil she’d felt through their bond these past years. Before she could even attempt to believe the fact of his love, she was sure in that instant that she had done this to him. She looked into her brother’s tear-streaked, smiling face, and imagined her own unnatural longings creeping across the bond between them, corrupting him through the years until he thought her sickness was his own.

How could she deny what she still feared might be true?

“Mercedes.” Her mother’s face was pale. “I will ask you to be honest with me: what have you led him into?”

“Nothing!” Mercedes exclaimed, leaping to her feet. Her chair toppled back as she rose. She pivoted, lunging for it. She tripped over her own feet but she stopped its fall even as she herself hit the ground.

It was a ludicrous effort on the surface of it. But in a house as vast and echoing as Villa Riera, the sound of that one falling chair would have been tremendous. Of course, if she’d had a clear conscience, it wouldn’t have mattered. Mercedes might have let it fall, denied her mother’s accusations, waved at whoever poked their noses out, and continued on her way to the cellar. If she did not fear shame, she would not fear discovery.

Instead, she had fallen over herself trying to keep a gods-damned chair from hitting the floor. She could not meet her mother’s eyes.

The familiar despair opened up in her chest like an old wound. Arnau chided her when he sensed her succumbing to it, but it had been her companion in all those long, lonely years of silence. Mercedes knew herself to be a freak. This thing that ran in her blood - it was beautiful, but it was monstrous.

 _Stop this,_ she admonished herself, hiding her face as she fought off her tears _. Arnau has a right to be happy. He wants this. And if it is mine to give, he will have it._

Cecilia Domonova i Riera sat in her little ironwork chair. The accounts of Clan Riera - the pride and lifeblood of the clan she loved - lay neatly stacked on the table before her. She watched her youngest daughter, sprawled on the courtyard floor with her head bowed. Her little girl, who was everything she loved and feared and even resented in the Rieras: her sailor, her fighter, her Mercedes.

She tightened her grip on the armrests of her chair. If she went to her daughter now, Cecilia knew she’d never again find the strength to do what she must. Taking a deep breath, she called on duty, and duty made her steel. She would do what was best for her family: her own pain could not be greater than the good of the clan.

“This has to stop,” Cecilia whispered.

Mercedes kept her head low, hiding her face behind her hair. The tiles of the courtyard mosaic blurred before her eyes. Sunlight reflected off a gilt tile, refracting through her tears. She blinked. She saw that she sat atop the great cresting wave that crashed foaming around the base of the fountain. And there were the minute squares of gold amidst the blue - only a few, but just enough to give the impression of sunlight on the sea.

She thought of Arnau. Mercedes remembered that first night in their gable room at Port Combreuc. He’d reached out to cup her face and his hand hesitated at the last minute as though he’d been afraid to touch her, but that had not been regret. Arnau had buried his face in her hair and let out a long, shaking sigh that ended in a sob, but that had not been sorrow. A thousand such scenes presented themselves to her uncertain conscience, and one by one she dismissed them all.

Arnau believed this was right, even if she doubted. When she’d been wracked with guilt the morning after, her little brother had been the one who soothed her. He’d pulled her back down onto the bed, settling her head on his chest. Then he told her what he knew of the ancient Riera soul-twins.

Stroking her hair, he painted bright pictures of sibling pairs who’d ruled the clan when the islands were young. She’d known soul-twins had married in the old days, but the people in those stories seemed infinitely remote: they were grand, mythic stories and dusty names. Even their ghosts had faded, weathered in the tides of time. But Arnau made them live again. The scales fell from her eyes and she saw herself and her brother in those ancestral tales as she never had before.

She’d never known.

Mercedes had never imagined that had been why he’d spent all those long hours mewed up in the library, digging through copies of copies of stories written on crumbling paper made of reeds. Arnau: seeking out stories from the earliest days of the clan, when the Lafanese still had river rapids in their blood instead of tides. All that time he’d been finding his answers.

 _Part of the pattern_ , she told herself, repeating the words like a prayer.

Slowly, Mercedes stood. She met her mother’s eyes.

_Part of the pattern. Not unique, not different, not special, but part of the pattern._

The tiles felt cool and firm under her feet, as if the old house and the rock of the island beneath it lent her their strength.

_Part of the pattern. There have been hundreds like us, and there will be hundreds more._

The words poured from her:

“Senyora,” she said. “I am a true daughter of the Riera line. This is my birthright. I will not apologise for the blood of my father’s kin.” Barefoot in her brother’s shirt, she faced down her mother, glaring defiance at a world that would condemn her. “This is the fate the ancestors wove for us.”

Cecilia’s hand flew to her breast as though Mercedes’ words had been steel.

 _The blood of my father’s kin_.

Mercedes’ first home had been Cecilia’s own body. She had bought her little girl into the world bathed in Domonova blood. But she could not waver, not now.

“This is not fate, Mercedes! Have you ever heard of another clan that does something like this? Any other tribe of humankind that does not abhor it?”

“This is different!” Mercedes hissed.

“My gods, Mercedes, he is your _brother_! Your little brother! This is insane! You can’t wave your hand and tell me that some ancient story from the First Dawning after Vadae makes this any less unnatural!”

So her mother knew the old stories. That she knew but did not understand poured salt in the raw flesh of the wound.

“It brings us together, mama. It makes us whole! That can't be wrong,” Mercedes said, helpless to express the profundity of a bond she lacked the words to describe and that her mother could never truly understand. “And we’ve thought this through. There won’t be – we won’t let there be any _consequences.”_

The word “children” hovered in the offing. Cecilia covered her mouth as if she might be sick. She put a hand on the table to steady herself, eyes shut, willing Mercedes to stop.

Mercedes plunged desperately on: “We will keep this a secret! Uncle Germà and Uncle Ramir - they shared the same thing Arnau and I do, didn’t they? I know they did! Why can’t we do the same? We’ll find someone like Laia!” Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. Their bond was nothing like her uncles’: Mercedes and Arnau were far too greedy to share their love.

Her mother did not answer.

A heavy silence settled over the courtyard, broken only by the soft splashing of the fountain. Mercedes watched her, searching every line of that beloved face for some sign of acceptance or understanding - anything other than pain.

The silence stretched on. The summer sun beat down on Mercedes, plastering Arnau’s shirt to her back with sweat.

“I – perhaps I should go,” she said softly, stepping back.

Cecilia’s eyes snapped open, and she rounded on Mercedes. "Back up to your room? To do – to –”

"Yes," Mercedes replied, raising her chin.

"You can’t do this to us! You are not some clanless foreigner! Do you think you can simply do whatever you please with your life? You are a daughter of Clan Riera: you have a duty to your family!”

Cecilia took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and spoke the great truth of the Lafanese people with all the terrible conviction of the true prophet: “Blood owes debt to blood, Mercedes.”

Mercedes reeled. She felt the rightness of her love in her soul, but she had been bred and brought up to those words. They were stitched into her skin, weaving her into the great tapestry in whose warp and weft she found everything that defined her. Duty was her first instinct, and family her final source of truth.

Those words had been written above the gates of her own hell.

"A duty to my family?” She echoed, a hysterical edge in her voice. “You speak to me of what I owe? What I must do for my family?”

She tossed her head, a wild thing in the jaws of a trap, broken but fighting still: “Senyora, we are Riera soul-twins.”

The last word escaped her as a sob.

With an effort she started again, her words laden with all the agony of the conscious damned:

“ _Family_ did this to us.”

Cecilia felt her gorge rise in her throat.

“Do you have any idea how often I wished I had been born to some other family? To another clan, where I would not be fated to - to incest?”

She looked up at her mother, the lonely torment of her conscience showing plain on her face. Never had Cecilia seen anyone so desperately alone - as though she has no clan or family at all.

But the doubt that was worst. Mercedes had always been so sure of herself, questioning neither her duty nor her own ability to follow it. Now she had no guiding star. The doubt ate at her: Cecilia looked into a mirror, and it broke her heart.

She ran to her daughter, throwing her arms around her. Mercedes began to sob. She struggled at first, but Cecilia held on tight. Then Mercedes was clinging to her mother, her whole body shaking as she cried.

“Oh my jewel, my treasure, my little hurricane. My poor, brave girl. It will all be right, Mercedes,” her mother promised, stroking her hair. “I know. Family is the heaviest burden we can ever bear. I know. Oh, how I know.”

Mercedes shuddered, hiding her face against her mother’s shoulder. She’d longed to confide in her. Keeping this secret had eaten away at her like a rat gnawing at her heart. She knew there was only more pain to come, but perhaps for a moment she could stay here, just for a moment.

“We’ll find a way through this,” Cecilia said soothingly. “See, you know it’s wrong. Would you have wished to be born in another clan if you hadn’t felt that it was wrong? But don’t worry, darling: we can help you.”

Mercedes stiffened. Beyond logic, beyond duty, her heart rebelled.

 _No_.

The rejection sang through her blood, deep in the marrow of her bones.

_No!_

The word thrummed through the double-helix of her DNA, an ancestral truth resounding in her doomed, binary soul.

“No,” Mercedes whispered, so softly that she herself could not hear it. She held her mother with all her strength, even as the full flood of fate pulled them apart.

“We’ll separate you two for a time, until this all blows over. We’ll send you to my brother Ignasi’s, and Arnau can go to the Vilars, just as we did when you were younger. You know, when you were young, I almost thought - I began to suspect. That’s why I suggested that you two spend summers apart, to keep you from growing too dependent on each other. But see, now we’ll really give it a try. If you stay apart for a year, perhaps–”

“No!”

Cecilia faltered, and Mercedes felt the tremor that ran through her mother’s body.

“Mercedes, you can’t - ”

Gently, Mercedes freed herself from her mother’s arms.

“Yes I can. We won’t be parted. You will accept this, mother.”

One moment, Cecilia was stern and unassailable.

Then her heart, already so laden with burdens, broke. The spirit of anger abandoned her. The mask shattered, and Mercedes saw a woman she did not know. On Cecilia Domonova i Riera’s face she saw years of struggle, of sacrifice, of pain, and of doubt. She couldn’t begin to guess what hand had written such hardship there.

Cecilia collapsed into her chair, reaching imploringly to her daughter.

"Don't do this,” she pleaded.

Mercedes fell to her knees in front of her, bewildered to see so much unfamiliar pain in those familiar eyes. _Arnau’s eyes_. Mercedes took her shaking hands. She pressed them to her brow, her tears smearing the ink stains on her mother’s fingers.

Apologies and promises crowded her throat - she only had to speak them to be absolved. But as her tears fell over their clasped hands, Mercedes could smell Arnau on her own skin.

Her heart lurched. Reeling, she clambered to her feet, staggering away from her mother with a sick twist in her gut. She'd almost betrayed Arnau; she'd almost betrayed herself.

Cecilia looked up at her, face haggard, hands still lying open on her lap as if she couldn't quite believe Mercedes no longer held them.

"No, Mama. I’m sorry - _I’m so sorry_ \- but I didn't do this to him! We didn't have a choice!”

Mercedes dashed away her tears, scrubbing at her face with Arnau’s sleeve.

“And we love each other! We’re happy at last. Surely, surely you see that?”

Her mother gazed at her in silent anguish, and Mercedes saw that she still would not - perhaps could not - understand.

"My poor little girl," Cecilia whispered. “My beautiful little boy.”

"We don't need pity!” Mercedes cried, goaded beyond endurance to shouting. Her aunt’s exotic birds took flight from the rafters, winging up into the golden sky. Taking a deep breath, she lowered her voice again: “Perhaps once, when we were both fighting this, we deserved pity. You saw what it did to us to fight this. You saw. I know you did. Isn’t this better?”

Cecilia Domonova covered her face with her hands, mute and appalled.

“This – this is what we must be, mother."

And with that, she turned to go.

Cecilia made as is if to rise from her chair but her strength failed her. She fell to the floor, scattering papers across the tiles.

Mercedes bit her lip, stifling a sob. She wavered for one final moment, balanced on a knife’s edge. Then she made her decision: a decision that had been made for her generations ago.

And she left. It was too late to go back: it had been too late for a long, long time.

Mercedes climbed back up the stairs to the upper gallery overlooking the courtyard, each step heavier than the weight of oceans.

Then her hand was on their door, and she pushed it open.

Arnau sat up in bed, stretching and scratching at the stubble shadowing his cheeks. He smiled as he saw her, then froze. She felt the cold touch of his sudden doubt and saw the smile slip from his face.

In an instant her composure broke. She flew across the room onto the bed and into the shelter of his arms.

“Mercedes! _Carinyete, carinyete,_ what happened?”

She sobbed – the gulping, broken sobs of a lost child, wracking her body and making her gasp for air. Tears welled up in Arnau’s eyes even as he pulled her close. She rested her head on his shoulder, their bodies two halves of one whole. Mercedes felt him take up the burden of her sorrow with her, sharing in total empathy as only a soul-twin could, but for once it only made her cry harder.

“No, no, none of that: tell me what happened,” he said, brushing her hair back from her face and wiping her eyes and nose with the bedsheets.

“It's Mama. She doesn’t understand.”

Arnau paled.

“Oh ancestors,” he whispered.

“She blames _me_ , Arnau.”

He understood instantly: Cecilia’s inability to fathom their bond, her broken-hearted revulsion, and her voice speaking the condemnation of all the world beyond this little room.

Arnau leant his forehead against hers and began to cry in earnest.  

They clung to each other, weeping as loudly as they dared, sitting on the bed they'd shared since Arnau was old enough to clamber from his crib.

This joy they had was so new, so dearly bought - perhaps too dearly.

But it was still the greatest joy they had.

**Author's Note:**

> Cecilia eventually reconciled herself as best she could to the whole relationship. She and Papa Raül had a lot of fights about it, and Arnau spent a lot of time explaining things to her, but eventually Cecilia realised she'd have to either accept things as best she could or live with a huge rift between herself and two of her children. She picked acceptance. As long as Mercedes and Arnau kept the true nature of their relationship secret, it could not damage the family honour, and she could live with that.  
> (But man, the Rieras are fucked up.)


End file.
